We’ve talked about several ways of thinking that are not helpful—and even harmful, along with suggestions about how to counter each one. Let’s do a round-up of these: Black-and-white thinkingAsk questions to arrive at a more balanced viewpoint: “Really?” “What do you mean by…?”Use more nuanced …
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is another way of thinking that can add to negative feelings and sabotage constructive effort. The motto of overgeneralization is not “if you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.” It is rather “Because you didn’t succeed the first time, you are doomed to failure” or …
Negative Filters
Have you been wearing dark glasses lately? Negative filtering is one way to get ourselves into a negative-feedback loop that can be challenging to get out of. This type of thinking keeps us aware of and dwelling on negative aspects of ourselves or our situation, and either discounting or entirely …
Labeling
Labeling is a form of negative over-generalization used for people. We take a single event, behavior, or characteristic and use a label to generalize it to the whole person. We can label ourselves, or others. This is also called global labeling or mislabeling. The problem with this kind of labeling …